"You know you should bring them if you want me to have them, and I"m only too glad to get them, anyway. Don"t think I"m criticizing."
He smiled and began at once on the "old days," as he now called them, a sad commentary on our drifting days. Indeed he seemed able to talk of little else or fast enough or with too much enthusiasm. He went over many things and people--M----; K----, the wonderful art-director, now insane and a wreck; the group of which he and I had once been a part; his youthful and unsophisticated viewpoint at the time. "You know," he confessed quite frankly finally, "my mother always told me then and afterwards that I made a mistake in leaving you. You were the better influence for me. She was right. I know it now. Still, a life"s a life, and we have to work through it and ourselves somehow."
I agreed heartily.
He told me of his wife, children, farm, his health and his difficulties.
It appeared that he was making a bare living at times, at others doing very well. His great bane was the popular magazine, the difficulty of selling a good thing. It was true, I said, and at midnight he left, promising to come again, inviting me to come to his place in the country at my convenience. I promised.
But one thing and another interfered. I went South. One day six months later, after I had returned, he called up once more, saying he wished to see me. Of course I asked him down and he came and spoke of his health.
Some doctor, an old college pal of his, was a.s.suring him that he had Bright"s disease and that he might die at any time. He wanted to know, in case anything happened to him, would I look after his many mss., most of which, the most serious efforts at least, had never been published. I agreed. Then he went away and I never saw him again. A year later I was one day informed that he had died three days before of kidney trouble.
He had been West to see a moving-picture director; on his way East he had been taken ill and had stopped off with friends somewhere to be treated, or operated upon. A few weeks later he had returned to New York, but refusing to rest and believing that he could not die, so soon, had kept out of doors and in the city, until suddenly he did collapse.
Or, rather, he met his favorite doctor, an intellectual savage like himself, who with some weird desire to appear forceful, definite, unsentimental perhaps--a mental condition L---- most fancied--had told him to go home and to bed, for he would be dead in forty-eight hours!--a fine bit of a.s.surance which perhaps as much as anything else a.s.sisted L---- to die. At any rate and in spite of the ministrations of his wife, who wished to defy the doctor and who in her hope for herself and her children as well as him strove to contend against this gloom, he did so go to bed and did die. On the last day, realizing no doubt how utterly indifferent his life had been, how his main aspirations or great dreams had been in the main nullified by pa.s.sions, necessities, cra.s.s chance (how well he was fitted to understand that!) he broke down and cried for hours. Then he died.
A friend who had known much of this last period, said to me rather satirically, "He was dealing with death in the shape of a medic. Have you ever seen him?" The doctor, he meant. "He looks like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for an undertaker. I do believe he was trying to discover whether he could kill somebody by the power of suggestion, and he met L---- in the nick of time. You know how really sensitive he was. Well, that medic killed him, the same as you would kill a bird with a bullet.
He said "You"re already dead," and he was."
And--oh yes--M----, his former patron. At the time of L----"s sickness and death he was still owing him $1100 for services rendered during the last days of that unfortunate magazine. He had never been called upon to pay his debts, for he had sunk through one easy trapdoor of bankruptcy only to rise out of another, smiling and with the means to continue.
Yes, he was rich again, rated A No. 1, the president of a great corporation, and with L----"s $1100 still unpaid and now not legally "collectible." His bank balance, established by a friend at the time, was exactly one hundred thousand.
But Mrs. L----, anxious to find some way out of her difficulty since her husband was lying cold, and knowing of no one else to whom to turn, had written to him. There was no food in the house, no medicine, no way to feed the children at the moment. That matter of $1100 now--could he spare a little? L---- had thought--
A letter in answer was not long in arriving, and a most moving M----y doc.u.ment it was. M---- had been stunned by the dreadful news, stunned.
Could it really be? Could it? His young brilliant friend? Impossible! At the dread, pathetic news he had cried--yes he had--cried--and cried--and cried--and then he had even cried some more. Life was so sad, so grim.
As for him, his own affairs were never in so wretched a condition. It was unfortunate. Debts there were on every hand. They haunted him, robbed him of his sleep. He himself scarcely knew which way to turn.
They stood in serried ranks, his debts. A slight push on the part of any one, and he would be crushed--crushed--go down in ruin. And so, as much as he was torn, and as much as he cried, even now, he could do nothing, nothing, nothing. He was agonized, beaten to earth, but still--. Then, having signed it, there was a P.S. or an N.B. This stated that in looking over his affairs he had just discovered that by stinting himself in another direction he _could_ manage to sc.r.a.pe together twenty-five dollars, and this he was enclosing. Would that G.o.d had designed that he should be better placed at this sad hour!
However that may be, I at once sent for the mss. and they came, a jumbled ma.s.s in two suitcases and a portfolio; and a third suitcase, so I was informed, containing all of a hundred mss., mostly stories, had been lost somewhere! There had been much financial trouble of late and more than one enforced move. Mrs. L---- had been compelled--but I will not tell all. Suffice it to say that he had such an end as his own realistic pen might have satirically craved.
The mss., finally sorted, tabulated and read, yielded two small volumes of excellent tales, all unpublished, the published material being all but uniformly worthless. There was also the attempt at a popular comedy, previously mentioned, a sad affair, and a volume of essays, as well as a very, very slender but charming volume of verse, in case a publisher could ever be found for them--a most agreeable little group, showing a pleasing sense of form and color and emotion. I arranged them as best I could and finally--
But they are still unpublished.
P.S. As for the sum total of the work left by L----, its very best, it might be said that although he was not a great psychologist, still, owing to a certain pretentiousness of a.s.sertion at times, one might unthinkingly suppose he was. Neither had he, as yet, any fixed theories of art or definite style of his own, imitating as he was now de Maupa.s.sant, now O. Henry, now Poe; but also it must be said that slowly and surely he was approximating one, original and forceful and water-clear in expression and naturalness. At times he veered to a rather showy technique, at others to a cold and even harsh simplicity.
Yet always in the main he had color, beauty, emotion, poignance when necessary. Like his idol, de Maupa.s.sant, he had no moral or strong social prejudices, no really great or disturbing imagination, no wealth of perplexing ideas. He saw America and life as something to be painted as all masters see life and paint it. Gifted with a true vein of satire, he had not, at the time of his death, quite mastered its possibilities.
He still retained prejudice of one type or another, which he permitted to interfere with the very smooth arrangement of his colors. At the same time, had he not been disturbed by so many of the things which in America, as elsewhere, ordinarily a.s.sail an ambitious and earnest writer--the prejudice against naturalness and sincerity in matters of the intellect and the facts of life, and the consequent difficulty of any one so gifted in obtaining funds at any time--he might have done much better sooner. He was certain to come into his own eventually had he lived. His very accurate and sensitive powers of observation, his literary taste, his energy and pride in his work, were destined to carry him there. It could not have been otherwise. Ten years more, judging by the rate at which he worked, his annual product and that which he did leave, one might say that in the pantheon of American letters it is certain that he would have proved a durable if not one of its great figures, and he might well have been that. As it stands, it is not impossible that he will be so recognized, if for no more than the sure promise of his genius.
_The Village Feudists_
In a certain Connecticut fishing-town sometime since, where, besides lobstering, a shipyard and some sail-boat-building there existed the several shops and stores which catered to the wants of those who labored in those lines, there dwelt a groceryman by the name of Elihu Burridge, whose life and methods strongly point the moral and social successes and failures of the rural man.
Sixty years of age, with the vanities and desires of the average man"s life behind rather than before him, he was at the time not unlike the conventional drawings of Parson Thirdly, which graced the humorous papers of that day. Two moon-shaped eyes, a long upper lip, a mouth like the sickle moon turned downward, prominent ears, a rather long face and a mutton-chop-shaped whisker on either cheek, served to give him that clerical appearance which the humorous artists so religiously seek to depict. Add to this that he was middle-sized, clerically spare in form, reserved and quiet in demeanor, and one can see how he might very readily give the impression of being a minister. His clothes, however, were old, his trousers torn but neatly mended, his little blue gingham jumper which he wore about the store greasy and aged. Everything about him and his store was so still and dark that one might have been inclined on first sight to consider him crusty and morose.
Even more remarkable than himself, however, was his store. I have seen many in my time that were striking because of their neatness; I never saw one before that struck me as more remarkable for its disorder. In the first place it was filled neck-deep with barrels and boxes in the utmost confusion. Dark, greasy, provision-lined alleys led off into dingy sections which the eye could not penetrate. Old signs hung about, advertising things which had long since ceased to sell and were forgotten by the public. There were pictures in once gilt but now time-blackened frames, wherein queerly depicted children and pompous-looking grocers offered one commodity and another, all now almost obliterated by fly-specks. Shelves were marked on the walls by signs now nearly illegible. Cobwebs hung thickly from corners and pillars. There were oil, lard, and a dust-laden sc.u.m of some sort on three of the numerous scales with which he occasionally weighed things and on many exteriors of once salable articles. Pork, lard, mola.s.ses, and nails were packed in different corners of the place in barrels.
Lying about were household utensils, ship-rigging, furniture and a hundred other things which had nothing to do with the grocery business.
As I entered the store the first afternoon I noticed a Bible open at Judges and a number of slips of paper on which questions had been written. On my second visit for oil and vinegar, two strangers from off a vagrant yacht which had entered the little harbor nudged one another and demanded to know whether either had ever seen anything like it. On the third, my companion protested that it was not clean, and seeing that there were other stores we decided to buy our things elsewhere. This was not so easily accomplished.
"Where can I get a flatiron?" I inquired at the Postoffice when I first entered the village.
"Most likely at Burridge"s," was the reply.
"Do you know where I can get a pair of row-locks?" I asked of a boy who was lounging about the town dock.
"At Burridge"s," he replied.
When we wanted oars, pickles of a certain variety, golden syrup, and a dozen other things which were essential at times, we were compelled to go to Burridge"s, so that at last he obtained a very fair portion of our trade despite the condition of his store.
During all these earlier dealings there cropped up something curt and dry in his conversation. One day we lost a fruit jar which he had loaned, and I took one very much like it back in its place. When I began to apologize he interrupted me with, "A jar"s a jar, isn"t it?"
Another time, when I remarked in a conciliatory tone that he owed me eight cents for a can of potted ham which had proved stale, he exclaimed, "Well, I won"t owe you long," and forthwith pulled the money out of the loose jacket of his jumper and paid me.
I inquired one day if a certain thing were good. "If it isn"t," he replied, with a peculiar elevation of the eyebrows, "your money is. You can have that back."
"That"s the way you do business, is it?"
"Yes, sir," he replied, and his long upper lip thinned out along the line of the lower one like a vise.
I was in search of a rocking-chair one day and was directed to Burridge"s as the only place likely to have any!
"Do you keep furniture?" I inquired.
"Some," he said.
"Have you a rocking-chair?"
"No, sir."
A day or two later I was in search of a table and on going to Burridge"s found that he had gone to a neighboring city.
"Have you got a table?" I inquired of the clerk.
"I don"t know," he replied. "There"s some furniture in the back room, but I don"t know as I dare to sell any of it while he"s away."
"Why?"
"Well, he don"t like me to sell any of it. He"s kind of queer that way.
I dunno what he intends to do with it. Gar!" he added in a strangely electric way, "he"s a queer man! He"s got a lot of things back there--chairs and tables and everything. He"s got a lot more in a loft up the street here. He never seems to want to sell any of "em. Heard him tell people he didn"t have any."
I shook my head in puzzled desperation.
"Come on, let"s go back and look anyway. There"s no harm in seeing if he has one."